Unreal Engine 5.4-powered The Matrix Awakens demo: huge 40% CPU perf increase over UE5.0 build

Unreal Engine 5.4 delivers massive CPU and GPU performance improvements over the initial UE5.0 release, with The Matrix Awakens tech demo enjoying a healthy 40% upgrade in CPU performance when powered by UE5.4.

GPU performance running The Matrix Awakens under Unreal Engine 5.4 is also up by around 20% but the CPU performance increasing by 40% is a bigger eye-opener. MxBenchmarkPC did a fantastic comparison video of The Matrix Awakens on Unreal Engine 5.0 vs Unreal Engine 5.4 on NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card.

The YouTuber noted that a proper comparison is impossible because Unreal Engine 5.4 has added a bunch of new features that weren't present in Unreal Engine 5.0, this includes proper support for Virtual Shadow Maps, Hit Lighting feature for Hardware Lumen, and more.

The Matrix Awakens looks much better running on UE5.4, much better... so that additional CPU and GPU performance being squeezed out of it is needed.

When it comes to shader compilation, Unreal Engine 5.4 uses short shader pre-compilation step which means that games won't stutter like crazy at the beginning, but there are drops in performance because of shader compilation occuring during gameplay.

You can download The Matrix Awakens tech demo and see how the Unreal Engine 5.4 upgrades perform on your system here.https://drive.Google.com/file/d/1FRRPF62zupoDDev9HpMTEdaGbKEfyuzZ/view